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Comment by troymc | Hacker News Reader

"If however for legal reasons a licence is required, the license of your choice will be granted."

Very well, I want an exclusive license, meaning I'm the only person who can use this software. Also perpetual, of course, so the license never expires. And don't forget to indemnify me. But don't bother indemnifying yourself, so I can sue you if the software doesn't do everything I ever dreamed. And...

(I'm being sarcastic here. My point is that you can't get away with not licensing your free software, or saying the equivalent of "I don't care." It's not like there's a dearth of free licenses to choose from.)

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1000 times this.

If you really don't care about the license, just use MIT. It has the best combination of simplicity, compatibility with every other license, and it's already known and used in just about every collection of any sizeable amount of free or proprietary software.

Trying to go even further by using a weird, probably not legally enforceable declaration like this one, or other oddball things like public domain dedications, the Unlicense, the WTFPL, or CC0 is just likely to lead to more confusion, more problems with legal ambiguities in different jurisdictions, simply more time spent reading and evaluating the licenses to make sure there's nothing hidden or that it does have legal meaning in your jurisdiction, etc.

Yes, there are a few prominent examples of public domain dedication that are widely used, like SQLite. They make it work out by actually having all contributors sign an affidavit, and additionally charging a fee for people who really do want or need a license rather than the public domain dedication. Thus, being public domain is actually more work and more friction for the project than if everyone just licensed their contributions under a permissive license like MIT.

Plus, of course, 'public domain' is a very fuzzy concept and in some countries either doesn't exist or else exists in a very different form to the US. It's a legal minefield both the the producer and the consumer; way, way better to ignore it completely and use an OSI license.

(Apropos of nothing, I generally prefer the BSD-2 clause license to the MIT one because I think it's clearer and easier to understand, but they're fundamentally equivalent.)

Use ISC instead of MIT, it is equivalent, but a shorter and more modern version of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license

I don't know about the specific intentions of the author, but I also refuse to put an explicit license on my code, because I firmly believe that code cannot be owned, sold or licensed anymore than the Pythagorean theorem can. In that sense, I consider the refusal to put a bunch of legalese nonsense on/near my code a form of protest against the current copyright laws. I'm here to write code and I don't want to put a license on my work just to appease some lawyers, as it lends credibility to a system that I reject on principle. Doing it this way only presents a problem for people and companies who subscribe to the view that copyright is indeed a real thing.

So, you accept potential legal hassle for you and the users of your software in order to "protest against the current copyright laws"?

> I'm here to write code

Exactly. So why not just add a brief MIT license [1] to your code, painlessly clarifying your legal stance?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License#License_terms

While it could invite legal hassle for him and his users, if he thinks it's a fundamentally immoral thing then I can't fault him for not partaking and supporting the system by using a license, which does legitimize a system what he doesn't support.

> So, you accept potential legal hassle for you and the users of your software in order to "protest against the current copyright laws"?

Yes.

> Exactly. So why not just add a brief MIT license [1] to your code, painlessly clarifying your legal stance?

Because that does not clarify my legal stance at all. My legal stance is that code does/can/should not have a license and that no license is necessary to use any code. I feel like adding a license (even a permissive one) undermines this very idea.

The only people who insist on a license are exactly the people that this form of protest is meant to oppose.

>> My legal stance is that code does/can/should not have a license and that no license is necessary to use any code.

Is this an aspirational stance? Because at the moment that's not what the law says (in any country I know of) and simple licenses like the MIT are probably the easiest way to legally say that you're allowing any use the recipient likes.

Actually something with strong copyleft semantics might actually be more appropriate than MIT in this case (if we're already willing to legitimize the copyright system by having a license, which is necessary).

If the argument is that everyone should be free to use whatever code however they want, then MIT lets delivers on the "however", but not the "whatever". GPL slightly limits the "however", but delivers on some of the "whatever" due to its viral nature.

> Is this an aspirational stance?

Obviously.

> Because at the moment that's not what the law says (in any country I know of) [...]

True. But that's also why I'm unwilling to play along and express my views on the matter within a framework that I perceive to be immoral and wrong.

Hmm, I don't understand, why can't code be owned?

I don't see why it should be possible to own code.

I think the ownership of physical items is an intuitive concept that comes naturally from the scarcity of such items.

Code, algorithms or ideas on the other hand are not scarce and I think that the legal framework that makes it possible to own such immaterial things is immoral.

Ok, but my implementation as bytes on disk I can own, right?

The freeman on the land / sovereign citizen approach to copyright doesn't work.

Adding a free license isn't something you do to appease lawyers, it makes the principles you profess to hold into a reality rather than a trap.

I understand that there are practical problems with this approach, but I disagree with your conclusion: Adding a free license would express my principles within a framework that I fundamentally disagree with.

Your comparison with the freeman on the land / sovereign citizen line of thinking made me reflect on my own views on the subject, as these people are obviously nutjobs. However, I view my approach as a valid act of civil disobedience with no ill effects for anyone involved.

It seems like a reasonable approach to me; it shifts the burden of choosing the license to those who care about licensing. For example, if you work for a company with uptight lawyers you can just request Apache 2.0 and everybody's happy, rather than getting into arguments about public domain or WTFPL or some other stupid thing.

But does the author actually send messages granting those licenses, or is the user supposed to "will them into existence"? Because in the first case, the author just bought himself a whole lot of stupid work, and in the second, I don't see how anyone can be sure that will hold up in court.

Agreed. The simplest thing to do would have been to dedicate to public domain (creative commons zero license) - https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

No, the simplest thing to do would have been to use an actual non-restrictive OSI-approved license such as the standard MIT or Apache 2. CC0 is not OSI approved and is broken by design as it's a public domain dedication.

> [CC0] is broken by design as it's a public domain dedication.

Could you please expand on this a little bit ? CC0 is not only public domain dedication, it has terms for "when public domain dedication isn't possible, here's a list of things that are possible"

Well, the very simplest thing is just what he did. "Here guys, look at my code."

By doing so, he doesn't give up any (exclusive) rights he has as an author. It's not the best from a user's perspective, but it's the simplest and most conservative from an author's perspective (short of not releasing the code at all).

I think they meant "the simplest thing that would let others use the code how they like" ;)

CC0 falls back to a license in the absence of the public domain, so it's much stronger than a simple dedication IMO.

See OSI's comments on why it hasn't been approved here -

http://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero

Something like the Unlicense[0] seems like a viable alternative.

[0] http://unlicense.org/

Looks pretty close to the MIT license: http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

And using an existing widely known license has benefits, as in what is unlicense? This is the first time I hear from this, but I'm pretty used to deal with MIT licensed software.

It's very unfortunate that many geeks refuse to learn how licensing work (just like many users refuse to understand software).

Some licenses, like GPL/AGPL/LGPL, has been written by teams of lawyers to ensure protection for developers and users against lawsuits and patents. Other licenses has been written by people with no legal background.

I understand why it is a problem for some, but I guess it can be somewhat principled stance. I mean, refusing to accept all this lawyerish hassle, unnatural language any official documents must be written in and so on. Because, obviously, people who just make things and do not participate in any kind of legal struggle do not care about all this stuff.

So I can understand why some people do act like that.

Principle without action tends to narcissism though.

If people believe that Software Should Not Have Owners, they should use the GPL.

> My point is that you can't get away with not licensing your free software

djb did, before he released everything (or practically everything?) into the public domain. Look for my other comment thread to see the practical results of that.

Huh? djb had some sort of requirements, otherwise maintainers wouldn't have had the big tiff they did about his directory ideas (arguably better, but not in isolation). They couldn't package qmail up to use their distro-specific ways. Public domain fixed this, of course.

Read the page I linked to in the other subthread. djb never used a license.

Your example demonstrates how the idea that you need permission to use information is nonsensical.

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